August 20, 2010 // 6:50 am - Yesterday we caught a glimpse of some PS JailBreak Reviews which confirmed PS3 Firmware 3.41 is required, and today we have some PS3 JailBreak details from PlayStation 3 hackers SKFU and the DemonHades Team along with some pictures of the inside of the PS JailBreak (below) courtesy of PlanetadeJuego.com.

For those who missed it, PS JailBreak was first announced two days ago and is a USB device which allows end-users to play PS3 game back-ups on Sony's PlayStation 3 entertainment system.

"I just tested the software they uploaded and can confirm it works so far.

I can tell a bit about the backup manager. It seems the software uses bd_emu features to manage the backups. The HDD to use, should have a modified bd emu format, which sets all backups on first position, so the PS3 detects 'em all. Then you can choose the image to boot via the manager.

To directly copy and boot a game, the software would need to decrypt all layers on the fly. Meaning it decrypts all executables somehow, else it won't run. Even on a debug unit.

The hardware look like a copy of the original PS3 jigstick, used in SONY service centers to repair broken PlayStation3 SKU's. Someone internal leaked or sold a stick, so they had the chance to reverse and clone the hardware.

The stick should boot before the normal firmware does, so it's hard to patch it. Maybe SONY could update the bootcode to prevent it, set it to a revoke list.

By the way, in all videos they use debug PS3's to run the software. There is no video showing the actual process booting on a retail PS3 afaik. So I do not confirm that this is true, yet!

If it's as true as it looks this time, good job guys!"

And now here are comments from DemonHades Team on PS JailBreak, to quote (roughly translated):

"Well I see that recently raised a stir is mounted by a chip of course to load backups from a pendrive, at first glance one might say it's fake if we did not know of studies conducted years ago and let us see many more hidden things that not all users can understand, in this case we speak of the card jig, the jig is used by the card sony sat for maintenance and restoration in ps3.

In short, this jig card has been removed from the payment sony sat.. so now try to expand the money spent only and once recovered the money spent in obtaining this device the reproduction and cloning of the device will be imminent.

When I saw the body of the above, first I noticed that the sample vsh known and used parts of a debug.. and of course if one is launching retail which does not make much sense, could only think one way quickly- THE CONVERTER RETAIL TO DEBUG.

This converter is thought to sony and service for devs have this jig card (aka USB dongle), allowing this USB is that:

Releasing the boot ini dev_usb0 and a sequence of buttons that change the state of syscon as we launch the initial boot usb dongle, then interprets the bootstrap and load the necessary files from the dongle itself temporarily leaving the ram doing a false reboot.

According to the store have told the seller, no residue on the PS3.. so it fits the above description.

The idea is quite clear gentlemen, emulates the fw of trm syscon and we have a debug interprets loading the kernel debug and providing all the features to debug vshmain time, this results in loading unsigned code.

This allows us as I mentioned months ago to launch pkgs from ubs, since it has a browser for managing them.

The official BDEMU disk loading before you activate the mediatype BD and then run the loader to the channel of communication with the real reader would be closed and only would use the BD-emu, emu and the bd can not share the same channel communication.

In this case to remove the layer is used to extract cellftp to an external source of filesystems without pre-decoded and converted to debug layer.

Executables can be created with the sdk, and generated their own loader which removes the layer of encryption (this if it will extract the discs, not linux), then the PS3Gen (published as a matter of 1 month) can be create iso patched with valid soft.esto itself mean that everything is made in the PS3 SDK (emulators, applications, etc) will be loaded without problems, as we are doing the same as the 360 with jtag hack it uses a core debug.

The loader is loaded by the execution path that recognizes the actual application manager, loaded via app.

TRUE GENTLEMEN OF THE NEWS WOULD BE A GREAT TIME AND NEWS bad news... Let me explain:

1. NO SERIOUS WORK DONE BY HACKERS OR RESEARCHERS.

2. MATERIAL IS MADE LIKE THE MAGIC BATTERY FOR PSP WITH SONY TOOLS.

In short, PS3 has fallen to the very tools you use in your SAT Sony... that if Sony can plug it into the next update.. just have to cancel the initial boot usb to close the bar, because the boss is syscon."

Do you think that maybe they picked up a regular USB stick, flashed the chip, and then shorted a couple of points on it so that computers cannot recognize the thing as a USB stick?

The reason I ask is that you mentioned that the chip is very very simple, so, I think they must be using security by obscurity to keep you from plugging any "leaked" hardware you obtained into a computer.

Another question is more for the devs rather than the hardware expert, but do you think that the dongle is still needed after any .pkg file is installed?

If I install a .pkg file, remove the dongle and reset the console, will I be able to run the newly installed executable/homebrew without using the dongle? Since we would only need to run unsigned code once to install the .pkg file (like some demos that were found to be un-encrypted), the system should be able to run things that were already installed without the need for the dongle right?

I attached what Tsujin believes (unconfirmed) to be the pin-out to the PS JailBreak above HERE with another less successful pin-out attempt from bushing on IRC HERE and an attempt by knightsolidus, and to quote from Tsujin:

All that's left are a couple SMT's, a crystal oscillator, some surface mount LED's and for someone to take a psjailbreak, stick it in any 18F compatible pic writer and dump the hex contents of the chip and slap it on a bunch of new chips, the single layer PCB is really, really basic.

And the bad part?, as far as the original makers are concerned, the device is so simple that it will be no different, in any way, to the original, when cloned.

Think of this, not as a PS2 modchip, but more like the original PIC based ps1 modchip - The only thing that differentiated the various models was the code on them, not the hardware itself - the hardware will be the same, as will the contents of the chip.

Oh, and for the record, the parts (not in bulk, but for a single unit, from connectors to chip and so on), is £5.68 ($8.82), if you were making these things in bulk, that price drops to £2.14 ($ 3.32) per unit.

People buying the thing at $170AUS either have more money than sense, or no sense at all.